Valerie Tarico is a
psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the
founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of
"Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old
Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings."
Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

If
pedophile payouts weren’t
enough to convince you the Catholic leadership is often
anything but moral,

take a look at some of their other
sins.

Did the Catholic Bishops wince last week when their leader,
anti-contraception Cardinal Timothy Dolan,
was exposed for
paying pedophiles to disappear?

One can only hope. After all, these are
men who claim to speak for God.

They have direct access to the White
House, where they regularly weigh in on issues ranging from military
policy to bioethics, and they expect us all to listen - not because
of relevant expertise or elected standing, but because of their
moral authority.

Ahem.

If pedophile payouts weren’t enough to convince you that this
“moral” authority is often anything but moral, take a look at some
of their other sins against compassion and basic decency.

1.
Excommunicating doctors and nuns for saving lives

In 2009, a 27-year-old mom, pregnant
with her fifth child, was rushed to a Phoenix hospital, St. Josephs,
where her doctors said she would almost certainly die unless her
pregnancy was aborted immediately.

The nun in charge approved the emergency
procedure, and the woman survived.

The local bishop promptly
excommunicated the nun.

"There are some situations where the
mother may in fact die along with her child. But - and this is the Catholic perspective
- you can't do
evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means,"
said Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the
Diocese of Phoenix.

How far are the Church authorities
willing to take this “moral” logic?

In Brazil last year, with Vatican
backing, the Church excommunicated a mother and doctor for saving
the life of a 9-year-old rape victim who was pregnant with twins.
(At four months pregnant, the girl
weighed 80 pounds.)

As we have seen, the moral priorities of
the bishops are laid naked when they decide who to excommunicate and
who not.

The doctor and the mother of the
pregnant 9-year-old got the boot for approving an abortion, but not
the stepfather who had sexually assaulted the child, probably over a
period of years. A similar contrast can be seen between the case of
the Phoenix nun and hundreds of pedophile priests who were allowed
to remain Catholic even after they finally were identified and
removed from the Church payrolls.

In New York, a bill that would give
child molestation victims more time to file charges has been
blocked
seven times by the Catholic hierarchy led by none other than
Cardinal Dolan.

Why?

"We feel this is terribly unjust, we
feel it singles out the church, and it would be devastating for
the life of the church.”

In other words, regardless of whether
the abuse really happened or what the consequences were for victims,
what matters is how much additional lawsuits might cost the Church.

Isn’t that the ends justifying the
means?

3. Using churches to
organize gay haters

When the Washington State legislature
approved marriage equality this spring, fundamentalist Christians
across the state organized to reverse the legislation.

Even though
three quarters of American
Catholics think that gay marriage or civil unions should be legal,
Archbishop Peter Sartain jumped to the front of the pack,
decreeing that Western Washington parishes under his "moral
authority" should gather signatures for an anti-equality initiative.

To their credit, a number of priests
refused, and a group called Catholics for Marriage Equality is
raising money for ads.

In contrast to the Catholic League,
which
has made the degrading argument that sex between priests and
adolescent boys is consensual homosexuality, lay Catholics appear to
know the difference.

4. Lying about
contraceptives to poor Africans

Of all the mortal sins committed by the
men of the cloth, the most devastatingly lethal in the last 30 years
has been the Catholic hierarchy’s outspoken opposition to condom use
in Africa.

In 2003, the president of the Vatican's
Pontifical Council for the Familypublicly lied about the efficacy
of condoms in preventing both pregnancy and HIV:

“The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times
smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass
through the 'net' that is formed by the condom.”

The archbishop of Nairobi
told people
that condoms were spreading HIV.

Some priests told parishioners that
condoms were impregnated with the virus.

The motivation for such flagrant falsehoods? The Church has
practiced competitive pro-natalism for centuries, but lately
anti-contraceptive edicts have been ignored by most educated
European and American Catholics, and Italy has the second lowest
birthrate in the Western World,
at 1.3 per woman.

They wrap their opposition to
contraception in lofty moral language such as that offered by Pope
John Paul II:

It seems profoundly damaging to the
dignity of the human being, and for this reason morally illicit,
to support a prevention of AIDS that is based on a recourse to
means and remedies that violate an authentically human sense of
sexuality.

As late as 2009, John Paul’s successor,
Benedict, continued to tell poor African Catholics that condoms were
“wrong” and even suggested that they were making the epidemic worse.

With god-knows-how-many lives lost and
children orphaned, he
finally softened his stance in 2010.

In rural Arizona near the Mexican
border, women delivering babies by cesarean section
were refused
tubal ligations because their independent hospital was negotiating a
merger with a healthcare network run by Catholics.

Worse, when a woman arrived
at the same
hospital in the middle of a miscarriage and need a surgical abortion
to complete the process, she was forced to travel by ambulance to
Tucson, 80 miles away, risking hemorrhage on the way.

All over the U.S. secular and
Catholic-run health systems are merging, and patients are quietly
losing the right to make medical decisions based on the best
scientific information available and the dictates of their own
conscience.

Even when the Catholic-owned hospital is a small part of the merger,
administrators insist that Catholic directives apply to the system
as a whole. These directives prohibit not only abortions but also
contraceptives, vasectomies and tubal ligations, some kinds of
fertility treatment, and compliance with end-of-life patient
directives.

Ectopic pregnancies cannot be handled in
keeping with the medical standard of care. As biotechnologies and
treatments relevant to the beginning and end of life advance, we can
expect the list to grow longer.

Patients cannot trust that they will be
told other options are available elsewhere.

One of the bitter ironies here is that even wholly “Catholic”
hospitals and charities are staffed primarily by non-Catholics and
largely provide services to people of other faiths or of none, paid
for with tax dollars. In healthcare much of the money flows from
Medicare and Medicaid.

In 2010, non-medical affiliates of
Catholic Charities received 62 percent of annual revenue from the
taxpayers - nearly $2.9 billion. Only 3 percent came from church
donations, with the remainder coming from investments, program fees,
community donations and in-kind contributions.

And yet all of those dollars get
directed according to the dictates of bishop conscience rather than
individual conscience.

6. Slapping down nuns

Catholic charities and hospitals are at
some competitive advantage in part because of hard-working nuns,
many of whom have skills and responsibilities that exceed their
compensation.

The bishops are the Catholic Church’s 1
percent; the nuns are managers and service workers - and many have
taken the kind of poverty vows that America’s 1 percent is trying to
impose on the rest.

Because many nuns live in the real world, where
suffering and morality are complex, they often make
care-based
decisions and take nuanced positions on moral questions that the
Council of Bishops resolves by appealing to dogma and authority.

Rome issued an 8-page assessment
accusing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of disagreeing
with the bishops and of “radical feminism.” It appears that their
labors on behalf of poor, vulnerable people had distracted them from
a more Christian priority:controlling other people’s sex lives -
oh, and standing up against the ordination of women.

The Archbishop
assigned by the Vatican
to rein in unruly American nuns is none other than Peter Sartain
of Seattle, the same moral authority who has declared a holy crusade
against gay marriage.

7. Bullying girl
scouts

Unlike the Boy Scouts, who recently
earned
media and public attention by booting out a gay den-mother,
the Girl Scouts have been stubbornly inclusive and focused on
preparing girls for leadership.

For example, last year a Colorado troop
included a trans-gender 7-year-old. That’s a problem for the
Bishops, and since up to a quarter of American Girl Scouts are
Catholic kids with troops housed in churches, they see it as their
problem.

To make matters worse, the American Girl
Scouts refused to leave their international umbrella, the World
Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, which has
stated that
young women,

"need an environment where they can
freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality."

The World Association would appear to
believe the data that girls who can’t manage their sexuality and
fertility are
more likely to end up in poverty than leadership
positions.

“The new inquiry will be conducted
by the bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and
Youth. It will look into the Scouts' 'possible problematic
relationships with other organizations' and various
'problematic' program materials, according to a letter sent by
the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne,
Ind., to his fellow bishops."

We’re talking about an organization run
by women for girls facing an all-male inquisition.

In today’s
Catholic church, leadership still requires a 'y' chromosome.

8. Purging popular
and scholarly interfaith bridge builders

Lest some reader assert that the sins of
the Bishops are all a consequence of sexual repression - some
contorted pursuit of sexual purity that degrades both sex and
compassion - it is important to note that the current cohort of
Church authorities are as obsessed with doctrinal purity as sexual
purity.

It would take me many paragraphs to
describe their tireless pursuit of purity as well as retired
Anglican bishop, John Shelby Spong, does
in one:

Hans Kung, probably the best read
theologian of the 20th century, was removed from his position as
a Catholic theologian at Tubingen because his mind could not be
twisted into the medieval concepts required by his church.

This
action was carried out by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who at that
time under Pope John Paul II held the office that in another
time gave us the Inquisition.

Matthew Fox, one of the most popular
retreat and meditation leaders and an environmental activist,
was then silenced by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Professor
Charles Curran, one of America’s best known ethicists, was
removed from his tenured professorship at Catholic University in
Washington, D.C., also by the same Cardinal Ratzinger.

Father Leonardo Boff, the best known
Latin American liberation theologian, was forced to renounce his
ordination in order to continue his work for justice among the
poor of Latin America by the same Cardinal Ratzinger.

Next we
learn that the Vatican, now headed by Cardinal
Ratzinger under his new name Pope Benedict
XVI, has ordered the removal of a book from all
Catholic schools and universities written by a popular female
theologian at Fordham University, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson.

Now the nuns are to be investigated.
Conformity trumps truth in every direction.

The Catholic tradition defines deadly or
“cardinal” sins as those from which all other sins derive.

In addition to lust, gluttony, wrath,
sloth and envy, the traditional seven include pride and greed,
which, to my mind, drive much of the appalling behavior in this
list. If an attempt to assert autocratic control over the spiritual
and physical lives of lay people isn’t pride, I don’t know what is.
And if a willingness to silence child victims to protect church
assets isn’t greed, I don’t know what greed is.

To me, ultimately, the sins of the Catholic bishops are “deadly
sins” because they kill people, whether pregnant mothers or
depressed gay teens or African families, or simply desperate people
who are forced into greater desperation by “moral” priorities that
distract from real questions of wellbeing and harm.

What the Bishops will have to account for when they meet their
maker, none of us can say. For some American Catholics, the process
of holding them to account has already started. The Women Religious
have pushed back against the condescending “assessment” issued by
the Vatican.

Picketers meet monthly outside Sartain’s
cathedral to protest his stance against equality. The Franciscan
brothers
issued a statement of solidarity with the nuns, many of
whom have remained
solidly focused on economic justice instead of
sexual transgressions.

Given the arrogant cruelty of Church leaders, criticism to date has
been remarkably tempered. As the Bishops flash their moral authority
in the White House and media and pulpit, clothed in white robes and
draped in crimson, they should be glad they aren’t eyeball to
eyeball with Jesus himself.

As the writer of Matthew tells it, he
called out the corrupt religious leaders of his day in no uncertain
terms:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and
Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which
look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead
men's bones and everything unclean.